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Comment by hirvi74 | Hacker News Reader

What do you mean by "see the file system?" It's not exactly hard to enable in Finder. In Finder's settings, one can have the root directory, home directory, etc. enabled in the sidebar. Not to mention, one can easily drag & drop common folders into the sidebar too.

Those settings with the hierarchy view makes seeing the file system quite clear in my opinion.

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So I’m in Microsoft Word. I hit the open file button and get the finder chooser window thing. I want to go up one level.

How??

I’m sure there’s some magical key combination to do it but I can never remember it.

That’s the first thing I can think off atop my head.

I’ve never played in Finder settings. Do I have to do that to get something useable? I didn’t even know it had settings it doesn’t seem like the sort of app that should.

Command + Uparrow.

In the Finder, look at the 'Go' menu, all those keyboard shortcuts works everywhere the file open/save window is displayed.

Like Command+Shift+D for Desktop, Command+Shift+O for Documents.

Click on the drop down at the top of the Open window (where the name of the current folder is displayed) and you get the whole path to choose from.

Thank you!!

This suggests that you were genuine in not knowing. But had you never done a quick web search? It's the kind of thing that I'd feel compelled to find whether I could change the behavior to fit what I would prefer.

Anyway, if you're unaware, here are a couple useful shortcuts for kbd-driven navigation: Command-Down (arrow) to dig one level down the file tree and Command-Up (arrow) to move to the enclosing directory / folder. I use it many times a day all day long.

The problem I've been having is that in Word "Recents" is selected by default. So I pull down that menu and it's useless (full of random Recent folders) The comment above made me realise if I pick "Documents" in the left hand side, that top menu changes from having a bunch of useless "Recents" in it and exposes the filesystem.

No I've never thought to Google how to use the Finder - it seems like that one thing that should be super intutitve - I've never had to Google how to use any other filesystem manager, Windows or Linux. Or iOS. Or Android.

“Recents” is not Finder. That’s actually Microsoft’s useleas UI. It would be far more usable if they did just open the real system file picker. (Msft messed this up on Windows too.)

Yea so it seems my frustrations come from not understanding the file picker isn't the finder. Anyway I've learnt a few things, so thanks everyone. I feel less powerless now.

But this is like the same as windows explorer right? It opens whatever view you used for the app (say, “recents”) and then you click something in the sidebar to go to the “real” filesystem?

I also didn't know how to do that, and I'm certain that I've looked it up at some point. It's just so unintuitive that I'd need to do it daily to remember

You right click on the folder name at the top of the window, this gives you the tree path from 'root'

Not the person you're replying to, but I assume they're referring to the ability to see something like:

``` src ├── app │ └── page.tsx └── components └── header.tsx ```

EDIT: Lol. I'm not even going to edit it. Hacker News, you also suck.

I can see that easily in Finder. List View or Column View displays files like that.

https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/mac-help/mchldaafb302/...

You have to indent the text by two or more spaces to count as code. Hacker News doesn't use Markdown, so backticks don't work.

FWIW, this is clear in the "help" link by the textarea.

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